Monday, March 16, 2009

Global Warming: Still Crap!
So says this from the American Thinker.

While I don't believe that the bubble of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) needed to be needled (the evidence against it is so overwhelming), apparently some are not as clear-headed about it.

Ultimately, Mankind is doomed. If we don't kill each other off in a nuclear holocaust, the Sun will eventually go Supernova and burn the planet to a cinder. If that doesn't happen, we'll get hit by a comet or asteroid, or some still-evolving germs, viruses or microbes will defeat both our natural defenses and scientific know-how. The Earth's magnetic poles will shift, the continents will drift apart unleashing geologic disaster, or invaders from another galaxy will decide we make yummy snacks. As it stands, scientists know the Moon is drifting away from us at something like 4 cm. a year, which would unleash hell. Doesn't matter: Earth, and all life on it, is ultimately doomed. That is just the nature of both the planet we live on, and the universe in which we live.

There is no saving the planet, which is beyond our power, and there is no saving mankind barring scientific advances that would have to include relatively cheap and easy interplanetary and interstellar travel, which despite Star Trek, is not necessarily within reach at the present. And even then, mankind would be subject to the same forces which threaten this planet and species on any other planet.

In the end, the Global Warming alarmists cannot achieve their stated goal; saving the planet. The issue of whether they can save mankind is still an open question, and in any case, is more involved than just studying the weather in the hopes of changing it. If we consider that the people who advocate the position that the Earth is warming and that in understanding the why and how in order to change it are just as smart as I am, and can apply logic in the same way, then they must also know that they can't 'save' anything. The power to do so is beyond the ability of man, and is presently reserved for the realm of science fiction and religion. Therefore, the stated goal cannot be the actual goal.

The few people I know who believe in AGW all happen to have the same traits. They don't all have the complete gamut of traits, but they share a great many of them. If you listen to them with a critical ear, you begin to find some common threads:

1. They hate human beings - Mostly the crowd who joins PETA, or who shows an unusual empathy for animals, attributing to them human characteristics, or who regard animals as being more noble than man. Their issue is with humanity; they don't understand or comprehend some of the more vile human habits and conventions (war, inhumanity to our fellow men, political discord, and so forth), and so they have arrived at the subconscious solution of wanting us all to be dead so that we'll be less inconvenient to them, or if they arrive at the idea that a dead human race means they can't get a latte at Starbucks when they want one, at least forcing us (through government) to modify our behavior to suit them. They can't stand their fellow man on one level or another, and feel that they are superior enough that they have the right to demand that the rest of mankind conform to their ideas and conventions. Barring willing submission and co-operation to with their 'enlightened' views, we need to be brought to heel by our 'betters' thorough regulation, taxation or force.

2. They hate particular human activities/practices - there's some activity that bothers them on some level. Conspicuous consumption, the practice of organized and established religion, political activity in direct opposition to their personal preferences, are all things that get their dander up. If you drive an ostentatious SUV -- you're an evil polluter. If you own a swimming pool -- you're an evil waster of precious water. If you deny their superiority, or haven't recognized how much they 'care' about polar bears and rising sea levels -- you're an evil polluter. You must be destroyed if you cannot be transformed or brainwashed. They are unable to make the great mental and emotional commitment to "live and let live", because to do so would rob them of the feelings of intellectual and emotional superiority they have bestowed upon themselves.

3. Politics - the great scam of AGW is that if the plans of the Global Warming Set were ever implemented (Kyoto Accords, Cap-and-trade policies, etc) the net effect would be a transfer of wealth from Western nations, the productive ones, to the non-productive ones. That transfer is not affected by outright theft -- robbing Britain to pay Belize would never fly-- but by arresting industrial and scientific progress in the West to allow the rest of the world "to catch up". It's why the largest populations/nations in the world (like India, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa and China) are often exempted from things like the Kyoto Treaty, and why places like the U.S., Japan, and Europe are expected to toe the mark religiously. And to pay for it all. The industrialized world is supposed to expend it's resources in order to provide technology which it ultimately cannot sell (it would be too expensive for anyone to buy), and therefore, would have to be given away, in the name of brotherhood. These policies are really intended to level the economic playing field by arresting progress and taking scarce resources from one front, and shifting them to another -- without recompense or reciprocation -- and will therefore produce an effective system of World-wide Socialism without the need for violent revolution, or without having to lay the intellectual groundwork necessary for it. Socialism would be effected under the guise of 'doing the right thing'. There would be no elections, no resolutions, it would just come into being, without anyone ever having to mention Socialism at all, or without uncovering a world-wide conspiracy which drives it. Science is being co-opted in the name of politics. The idea that this or that would 'save the planet', or 'heal' Mother Earth is just an illusion; it's supposed to make the gullible think that in sacrificing their own personal economic and political well-being that they are achieving some higher, and more laudable goal beyond selfish self-interest. And, of course, it'll all be controlled by some altruistic mechanism, like the U.N. or a cabal of the Enlightened (can you imagine Al Gore in charge of the planet?). All of the other great mind-fucks of history have operated along similar lines; Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Christianity, Islam, Scientology, the No-Nukes Movement, the ban on D.D.T., and so forth, have all used similar tactics: fear, envy, and a mushy Kumbaya-feel-goodism and trendy cachet. H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley made fortunes pimping this sort of stuff, only they called it 'fiction', rather than a Master Plan. Al Gore wants to make it reality...and get rich and famous while he does it. It is, after all, all about them and their feelings of superiority.

4. Global Warming Ideology has taken the Place of Conventional Religion -for some (like me), religion is little more than the expression of an ignorant superstition. Man cannot explain the great questions which vex him (Why do bad things happen to good people? Where did we come from? What happens to us after we die?) and so invents gods, and saints, and spirits and so on, to try to explain them. Eventually, technological progress and scientific discovery disprove religion (then again, religion, like global warming, doesn't really need 'proof' of anything -- only faith, which is a willful surrender of critical faculties), or at least bring into focus logical contradictions which cannot be reconciled. There are some who need the psychological comfort and surety that religion provides, but who reject religion because it does not provide concrete proofs like science does. The logical conclusion is to mix and match the two. Turn science with it's logical methodology into your new religion, without the intellectually-embarrassing need to believe in invisible beings. Faith now gets transferred from the perceived-to-be-fantastical to the perceived-to-be-factual.

I can prove that the idea of human activity altering the planet in such a way as to endanger it is bullshit, at least from the standpoint of global warming on a planet-destroying scale. Geologists and other scientists tell me that the very spot I sit upon while I write this screed was once buried under an ice sheet several miles thick. They say this ice sheet has advanced and retreated, many times in the geologic past, without a single factory or internal-combustion engine spewing one molecule of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere. That such naturally-occurring global events have been happening sans human activity, and will probably continue long after we and our technology are long gone, and they can point to geologic evidence. It's been proven that the Earth itself has undergone changes in geology, atmosphere and climate all by itself many, many times, again with irrefutable scientific evidence. It has also been postulated that it was possible 'pollution' caused by living things in the ancient past that made the world habitable for the whining pansies who cry about polar bears and SUV's --by pouring billions of tons of oxygen (and nitrogen, and water vapor, and yes, even CO2!) into the atmosphere by the processes of life itself. The science is there, all you have to do is look it up. But then again, if you did, you wouldn't believe in AGW, and these scientists would be out of a job, and the Revolution would never come to be. Certainly, the evidence, such as it is, can be debated, but the AGW brigade doesn't want debate; it wants compliance.

In the end, the arguments about AGW have nothing to do with science, and everything to do with the mindsets of two particular subsets of human beings; the insane and the insidious.

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